on Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 10:11:42AM +0100, Martyn Drake scribbled:

BTW, has anybody got anything good or bad to say about OpenBSD? One potential job could have me administrating such a box.

It's pretty much the same as most bsds from the user's point of view, except:

0) they wrote their own ipsec support. so instead of the not so well documented but relatively simple racoon for isakmp, they wrote isakmpd which is insanely complex, imho.

1) there are serious performance problems. i've talked to some people who have tried adding features to it, and came across two problems: theo was totally unwilling to accept anything they did (it was a research project at a university), and the task scheduler was generally crummy. (read: the worst they had seen)

2) openbsd doesn't look like it's going to get multiprocessor support any time soon. none of the core developers seem interested in developing it except for maybe having a few kernel threads purely for crypto.

when i switched a few linux boxes to net/free/openbsd, one thing that is very obvious is the increase in quality of man pages. they are clear and generally accurate. even most of the kernel internals have man pages! i found it pretty easy to pick up bsd stuff after linux; there aren't as many howtos for specific problems, but there are good mailing lists and man pages. there was more setting up to do than with, say, redhat, and no wizards to help along the way. /usr/ports or /usr/pkgsrc is pretty much a must. perhaps the hardest thing to do is to deal with /usr/src. patches are only distributed as diffs. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade-minifaq.html seems good for this.